A Sender-based Packet Loss Differentiation Algorithm based on Estimating the Queue Usage between a TCP sender/receiver

When TCP operates in multi-hop wireless networks, it suffers from severe performance degradation due to the different characteristics of wireless networks and wired networks. This is because TCP reacts to wireless packet losses by unnecessarily decreasing its sending rate assuming the losses as congestion losses. Although several loss differentiation algorithms (LDAs) have been proposed to avoid such performance degradation, their detection accuracies are not high as much as we expect. In addition the schemes have a tendency to sacrifice the detection accuracy of congestion losses while they improve the detection accuracy of wireless losses. In this paper, we suggest a new sender-based loss differentiation scheme which enhances the detection accuracy of wireless losses while minimizing the sacrifice of the detection accuracy of congestion losses. Our scheme estimates the rate of queue usage which is highly correlated with the congestion in the network path between a TCP sender and a receiver, and it distinguishes congestion losses from wireless losses by comparing the estimated queue usage with a certain threshold. In the extensive experiments based on a network simulator, QualNet, we measure and compare each detection accuracy of wireless losses and congestion losses, and evaluate the performance enhancement in each scheme. The results show that our scheme has the highest accuracy among the LDAs and it improves the most highly TCP performance in multi-hop wireless networks.